Origin of Life
by kittenkatpaw
Summary: Finally finished!  I hope the resolution doesn't disappoint. :   #   Past and present connect when Wall-E & Eve discover more of what BnL left behind, and the resulting clash will directly affect the future of every sentient robot.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Just some clean up on this chapter and ch. 3, fixing typos and a continuity glitch. :)

#-#

Stephen Jacobs surveyed the gathering, his expression carefully neutral. Inside, though, his stomach was churning. He just hoped he'd make it through this last ridiculous meeting. As if the deadlines of Operation Cleanup weren't enough by themselves, Forthright himself had called this last-minute debacle of a meeting and they had only been notified a scant hour before. As if the answers they could give would be any better now than they were four years ago.

Brad Thompson, Jacobs' intern, hustled into the conference room as if his lab coat were on fire. He bent to whisper in Jacobs' ear: "Forthright isn't coming. He'll telecomm."

Jacobs nodded and Thompson bustled back out. His stomach tightened queerly as he watched the kid leave. He liked Brad, he liked Brad's new wife and their new baby boy. He'd miss the kid.

He'd miss a lot of things.

He looked around the room again, into the faces of his teammates, searching for reinforcement for his wavering resolve. His eyes settled on Koicto. There. He could see it in her eyes, her set jaw, in every line of her: Arcadia never second-guessed anything. When she made a plan, she executed the plan, no questions, no excuses. They had gone over their options time and again, and they had devised their current plan of action. In only a few hours, they would execute it. In the long run, it was best for everybody; and after all, what was a year? And this silliness of missing people…_they _were the ones who would miss _him_, if any missing were done. After all, for him, the time would go by in a blink, half a heartbeat. Hardly a moment.

The whole business just made him squirm, that was all; this mess had just been one disaster to the next, hardly digging out from one before having the other fall on their heads. The fact that their employer, from their direct supervisor up to Forthright himself, refused to believe them-- well, that's why they had their own plan. He'd pushed for it hard, had to, since it was a frightful expenditure of money and resources for something no one else really thought was necessary. But he was Dr. Stephen Jacobs, and eventually they relented on the condition that he and his staff mention to no one, not family, not friends, what they were to do. After all, they couldn't have everyone taking this "easy way out," as Franz had called it. As if Franz was doing something difficult-- as one of the supervisors for the whole division, he'd be on Forthright's own cruise ship for the human race's five-year "vacation."

That was simple enough. None of them had any family, and only acquaintances, not friends. They didn't get where they were by having social lives.

He tapped his pen against the table. "Brad says Forthright's not coming. He'll be calling instead."

Emile leaned back in his chair with a visible sigh of relief. "Good. That guy makes me nervous."

Jacobs grinned at him; he felt the same way.

"Forthright's an idiot," Arcadia snapped. "That's why you can't stand him. Anybody who can't hold a reasonable conversation makes you nervous."

Sohn and Koicto. His senior team. Their antagonism was palpable; their genius, undeniable. They wouldn't be working with him, and certainly not on this project, if they weren't the best the world had to offer; but at times they could hardly seem to stand one another. Emile Sohn was unparalleled at hardware design, with only Jacobs and Koicto able to compete, though Jacobs lately had been giving more and more hardware work to Emile while he himself had begun to specialize in casings and relations-- his protégé had surpassed him, and he knew it. (Besides, he'd quite enjoyed laying out the physical design of the starliners' "wheels.") Koicto held the top spot for programming, no question. But her fondness-- or obsession, as Sohn called it-- for pushing envelopes bothered the younger man. "She wastes space," he'd complain at least once a week. "All that memory that could be doing something…_real_."

Jacobs knew exactly what he meant. When he himself had first begun working with Arcadia Koicto, he had puzzled over the vast amount of memory she essentially wasted in her creations, adding programs that ultimately, repeatedly, failed to produce the desired results. But her elaborate programs never interfered with the machinery's intended specifications, and the longer he watched her work with the delicate lines of code, the more he found himself defending the installation of it.

If anyone was going to "crack the code" for synthetic life, it was going to be Arcadia Koicto.

So Jacobs would listen patiently to Emile's complaints, and continue to let Arcadia pursue her pipedream. Because maybe, someday, the damn code would work, and then there they'd be, at the dawning horizon of a new world paradigm.

And what roboticist wouldn't give his…well, his _anything_ to be there?

Thompson's reentry brought him back to the present. Again he bent to Jacobs' ear, as if the rest of the team wouldn't know soon enough; but he answered to Jacobs, and took his work seriously. "Meeting's been called off. Something big came up, and they're canceling."

Jacobs leaned back and closed the file in front of him as Thompson left again. "That's it, folks. Meeting's called on account of rain. Back to the real world."

The sound of chairs scraping the floor filled the conference room; everyone had more important things to do than listen to Shelby Forthright complain about their timeline, and the cancellation was a welcome reprieve. Arcadia, though, hesitated by Jacobs' chair. "You all right?"

He leaned back nonchalantly. "Sure. You?"

She cocked her head at him, scowling. "You look like you're going to throw up."

He swallowed, her words nearly making themselves prophetic. "I admit to a certain…nervousness."

She grinned at him, but managed not to laugh outright. "You know there's nothing to cryo."

"Of course."

"Tomorrow morning will be three years from now, and everything will be fine."

He held up his hand. "You're seriously freaking me out now. I can't think like that, Cady. I need my days to all line up in a row."

"That's so boring," she replied, but her grin was still there, lightening the criticism; he picked up his file and left the room with her.


	2. Chapter 2

Wall-E buzzed happily down the corridor, humming along with his recording of "Put On Your Sunday Clothes." He slowed on occasion to sort through a particularly interesting pile of detritus, but managed to resist cubing any of it; Captain McCrea had given the robots "vacations" and "days off." The concept baffled the lot of them, but after seeing the robots working non-stop-- in some cases, literally-- to help make Earth habitable for the colonists, the Captain had insisted. "We don't want you to wear yourselves out," he had reasoned, trying to fit such an absurd idea into bot logic. The robots knew, of course, that the Axiom could easily create any replacement parts they needed, but the Captain seemed so very earnest that they could not refuse him. This week was the first week in his existence that Wall-E had been expected to do absolutely _nothing._ He and Eve spent the first day at a bit of a loss, mingling with the colonists and trying to make themselves useful at any task they could take up; several of the humans had scolded them lovingly and suggested that they research "vacation" on the Axiom's computer. After poring over the information she provided, they decided that they would "take a trip" and "go hiking." Eve had flown Wall-E to a section of the city that he had never seen-- other Wall-Es had cleared this area centuries before, so there had never been any need for him here-- and they had simply started wandering.

Soon, they both discovered that even without the magnificent forests and mountains the computer had shown them as typical "hiking" locations, they could still entertain themselves in the vast artificial caverns of the city. They always enjoyed being together no matter the circumstances, and now they took turns finding odd items here and there and showing them to one another. Soon Wall-E's "Ooooohs!" and Eve's giggles danced and echoed between the old skyscrapers. A few of the buildings still appeared sturdy enough for exploration, so they began darting into a few of them, finding little more than dust and strange scraps for the effort but enjoying it all the same. The impromptu escapade soon turned into hide and seek, though neither of them realized their new game had a name, and Wall-E found himself humming down his new corridor with the intent of finding a nice hiding place for himself-- though not _too_ good, of course. He definitely wanted to be found.

Still humming brightly, he turned a corner into a darkened corridor. The lights blazed on overhead. He slowed and looked up, but didn't stop; he was used to lights and holograms bursting to life when certain sensors were triggered. He used to pass by such ads for the Axiom every day on his way to and from work. Obviously, this building had solar panels and capacitors somewhere that still operated, and his presence had triggered the lights. He rolled a bit farther, his humming hitting a high note that coincided with the end of the corridor and a large, featureless door. As soon as he was close enough to see that the door had no visible mechanism with which to open it, he intended to turn and head back the other way in search of a hidey hole; but as he drew near the door slid open. "Whoa!" He stopped short and wheeled back out of his turn, clicking his music off with one claw. Cocking his head as far as he could, he peered into the open room. Whatever sensor he had tripped to open the door had also turned on the lights inside, illuminating rows of…something. He whistled to himself and rolled carefully into the room. "Whoooaaa," he repeated, trundling down rows of steel tanks stacked six high, almost higher than he could see, even if he craned his neck mechanism all the way back. He stopped and tapped lightly on one of the tanks with his claw, still tilting his head this way and that. He heard no response; the tank sounded empty. He crossed over a couple of rows. Here he found a tank that registered differently to his temperature sensors and he stopped again. A light tap here sounded muffled. "Ooooooh." He tried standing on his tip-treads, but he couldn't reach the top of the tank to see the lid. He scanned the tanks around it; several more registered as much colder than the ambient temperature, as this one did. He tilted his head at it a few more times, then decided that this mystery was even more fun than hide and seek, and flew at top speed out of the room to find Eve.

"Eevah!" he called as soon as he cleared the doorway. "Ev-Ev-Eevah!" He cast around for her and as he burst out of the corridor, he saw her gleaming white form racing through the building's erstwhile lobby toward his voice.

She pulled up when she spotted him, her cannon at the ready in case anything had threatened her beloved. He squinted his visor shields at her as if his eyes were crinkling in a smile while he shook his head "no" and waved her gun away. She cased the ion cannon immediately and calmed down, drifting down to nearly eye level with him. "Wall-E, all right?"

He nodded and reached her for fin, which she gave him readily. "Eevah, see! See!" he babbled, dragging her back down "his" corridor. She giggled and floated along behind him, grateful that he had simply found some new treasure he wanted to share with her, and not that something dire had happened to him. She had reckoned the Axiom to be large, though not as large as the area she was authorized to search when she would come to Earth once a year; but now that she lived on Earth, she was beginning to realize just how large it was, and how tiny Wall-E was in relation to it. It scared her sometimes, to think of how many awful things could happen to her love out there; but then she would remind herself what a resourceful beloved she had, and that he had survived this dangerous lonely place for centuries…that always made her feel better.

Wall-E slowed as they approached the "tank room" (as he thought he would call it, at least to himself) and released Eve's fin so she could explore the room on her own. He stayed at the doorway, clicking his claws together and watching her, his head tilted to one side. He adored watching her move. He adored her. Just seeing her float, gliding like a dream of a cloud made solid-- it would never get old for him, not if he lived another seven hundred years.

Eve floated by the racks of tanks, then began scanning them. She made a little noise to herself, a kind of quiet hum that Wall-E associated with keen interest on her part; he clicked his hands together faster. He had found something new, something worth investigating! He rolled toward the row with the colder tanks and pointed with one arm. "Eevah! This!"

She swept immediately toward him and ran her scanner over the tanks. Her eyes widened to perfect circles and she started visibly. "Ah!" she cried. She turned and grabbed Wall-E, wheeling off into the air with him and flying back down the corridor.

"Whoooo!" Wall-E called down the hallway, his voice echoing back to them. He stretched out his arms like wings, then tilted his head up.

Eve looked back down at him. Her eyes were still wide, but with no hint of fear or anger; she wasn't protecting him from anything, so he hadn't found anything dangerous. He concluded that must mean that he had found something even more interesting than he had anticipated. "Eevah?"

"Captain!" Eve replied, hardly watching as they left the building and dodged back and forth between the surrounding scrapers, climbing ever higher in the sky so they could fly straight back to the colony.

"Wall-E…goooood?" He clicked his claws together again.

Her eyes turned to crescents. "Verrrry good," she replied. "Special!"

He turned his eyes back to their path and spread his arms once more. "Whooooo!" he called to the clear morning sky.


	3. Chapter 3

Arcadia awoke groggily, the overhead light blinding. She tried to shield her eyes but found her arm too heavy; she couldn't imagine why she was so tired this morning. She slowly realized that she hadn't heard her alarm, but even the thought that she had overslept wasn't enough to jolt her fully awake. That nagged at her, though she wasn't sure why. She turned her head to check her clock…if she was late, the whole team would hear about it all week. Operation Clean-Up was too far behind schedule already.

Her clock was gone. So was her nightstand. In fact, her whole bedroom was nowhere to be seen.

Her memories began to click into place. Of course. Last night, they'd gone into stasis in the cryo tanks. It wasn't the next morning…as she'd told Jacobs, it was three years on. Or, she reminded herself, possibly later. Time to see how far off-course Operation Clean-Up had finally gone, and what measures could be taken about it while Operation Re-Colonize took its place. She assumed the takeoffs had gone smoothly, otherwise someone would be monitoring her and the others to bring them up to speed as soon as they awoke….

Others. She tried lifting her head but couldn't quite manage yet. She reassured herself, though, of the reliability of cryo. Her teammates were fine, no doubt. She flexed her hands and feet, feeling control ooze back into them. She wasn't foolish enough to try to sit up yet, but her limbs definitely felt less heavy.

"Ah! One of them's awake!"

She turned her head toward the voice, and a man's pleasant face moved into view. Over his shoulder, a sophisticated-looking medical robot hovered. The bot reminded her of something Jacobs would design, though he had never shown her specs for anything like it. The man spoke again, bringing her attention back to him. "Hello there. My name is Captain Benjamin McCrea. You're in the infirmary of the Axiom, and you're just fine."

She scowled slightly. "Axiom?"

"Yes. It's a starliner in the BnL fleet--"

"I know," she replied, her voice a bit slurred. She wished her mind wasn't still so gauzy-- how had she gotten aboard the Axiom if it was in space? And if it had landed and they were on Earth, why wasn't she in the cryo building's rewakening room?

"And you are--?" the Captain asked.

She frowned for real now. Hadn't he read her record before waking her? "Dr. Arcadia Koicto. BnL Robotics Division."

The Captain's face lit. "Really! Isn't that interesting! We don't have any roboticists. I'm sure we'll learn a lot from you!"

She tried to shake her head and succeeded, a little. "If you didn't know who I was, why did you wake me?" She glanced around but still couldn't see past her own bedside. "Are my colleagues here?"

He glanced around. "We found six of you. Everyone seems fine, though the others aren't awake yet."

"Okay." She supposed she would find out who the other three were eventually; right now she had bigger things to be concerned about. "Operation Clean-Up…."

"Oh, you know about that?" he asked brightly.

What on _earth--?_ "Of course I do. Why did you wake me up?"

"Uh--" The Captain glanced at the robot at his shoulder, as if for an answer. "Because we found you?"

"_Found--"_ Tossing sense aside, Arcadia levered herself up on her elbows. "What the hell is going on here--"

She managed to get herself upright, after a fashion, and could now see the room properly. Neat beds arrayed the walls; five of them were occupied. She was vaguely familiar with the Axiom's design and the room matched her memories of what it should be.

The robotic assistants ranged around the room, however, _did not,_ not by a long shot. Like the one at the Captain's shoulder, the medical robots looked sleek, rounded, beautifully streamlined, with unfamiliar equipment fixed at the ends of their actuators. When the Axiom was outfitted, many of the robots featured Jacobs' updated designs, including the Autopilot and several of the entertainment-centered bots, but these were at least two generations further advanced than those-- and those had been state-of-the-science. Why would they have needed to advance the medi-bots that far, that fast?

_They wouldn't,_ she thought, _unless something went very, very wrong._

"Toxicity levels…?" she asked, easing herself back to her pillow.

"Oh, they're fine--"

"No pandemics? No virus mutations or--"

Captain McCrea put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "I don't know what you expected things to be like when you woke up, but…it's probably not what you think."

She closed her eyes. He no doubt had that right.

His next question confirmed it. "Ah…what year do you think it is?"

She raised a weary arm and rubbed her forehead. "Oh, no. No. Stephen will never let me hear the end of this." She focused back on Captain McCrea. "What year?"

He patted her shoulder again in a way that told her she really, really wasn't prepared for the answer.


	4. Chapter 4

Jacobs seemed unable to sit down. Arcadia's eyes tracked him while he raged about the room, though her posture remained unchanged: slouched back in her chair, bracing her cheek against the fingers of one hand while the other hand draped over the end of the armrest. Emile sat across the table from her, completely silent and eyes nearly blank, still lost in the surrealism of the situation. The three strangers-- a family consisting of a husband-wife team of BnL executives, James and Sheryl Cooper, and their young son Daniel-- were dealing with it even less well, though at least the son's frightened yelling had softened to quiet crying against his mother's shoulder. Of the lot of them, Arcadia seemed to be handling things best, though she thought the child would be holding that place of honor had his parents not started screaming at Captain McCrea upon hearing just how long they'd been "sleeping."

Truth was, Arcadia figured she was too jaded to be panicked. She had known Operation Clean-Up was not going to work; well, it hadn't, and in a colossal way. She had truly expected to be in cryo longer than the year they planned for; while she certainly couldn't have predicted a seven-century sleep, she had at least been a little prepared for the shock, and now that they were here, they simply had to deal with it. The fact that their "superiors" had seen fit to leave them behind, still in stasis, after making the decision to leave Earth "for good" angered her, though their behavior leading up to and throughout the Operation certainly didn't make the revelation particularly surprising.

Her anger came twinned with sadness as it sank into her wakening brain that everyone she had ever known, save for Jacobs and Sohn, was long dead. She'd had no close friends or relatives, being passionate only about her work, but it was still a sobering thought; and on its heels came the realization that every machine, every robot she had ever designed or crafted had been long since scoured down to silt. _That_ was painful.

Jacobs, on the other hand, was outright infuriated. Rather than yelling at McCrea for no apparent reason as the elder Coopers had done, Jacobs practically jogged around the room-- Arcadia couldn't really call it pacing-- ranting to himself about cryo, about BnL, about the vagaries of fortune. Occasionally Arcadia thought she heard her own name mentioned in the tirade.

Eventually, though, exhaustion and hunger overtook panic and anger, and when the more boisterous of the lot became civil again, Captain McCrea offered to take them offship to start integrating them into the colony. They hauled themselves wearily after the captain and out into their new world.

All six of them stopped on the ramp leading off the ship. Arcadia felt a lump forming in her throat, words of sorrow, of anger, of overwhelming disappointment in her own species. At first all she saw was brown, the brown of lifeless dirt and urban decay; but as her overwhelmed mind adjusted, she saw that patches of vegetation, some ordered and some wild, cropped up here and there. The group started moving again and she went with them, though her gaze clung to the green patches like hope.

She realized that Captain McCrea was leading them toward a section of green which proved to be carefully tended squares of young shoots, each patch marked with a sign on a stake. Some of the plant names had been misspelled, with the mistake crossed out and the correct word written under it; others, though more complicated, were spelled correctly but written in a childish hand. Apparently the whole colony, young and old, were involved in reclaiming Earth, and she liked that idea.

The captain broke into her thoughts. "Oh, good! You'll get to meet the heroes responsible for bringing us home!"

She turned away from the garden and ran straight into Emile's back, banging her nose on his shoulder blade and rocking him forward a bit. "Sorry--" she began, but he interrupted her by reaching behind himself without looking at her, grabbing her by the arm, and thrusting her to the front of the group.

Captain McCrea had turned to face them and was smiling wide, his arms gesturing to the side; next to him hovered a sleek white robot with a black face screen and electric blue eyes, a beauty of a design that Arcadia remembered vaguely as preliminary sketches on Jacobs' desktop, a robot early in the making but never built-- well, no, she corrected herself, built, but years-- perhaps centuries-- later. Next to the white bot--

Arcadia's jaw dropped. "It's a Wall-E unit!" She strode forward as the waste allocator began to move, presumably in response to hearing its designation, and she dropped to her knee beside it. "Good lord, it's still operational? Did you find it and repair it? How is it still working?" Deftly her fingers flew over the front panel on the unit, opening a small flap to reveal a series of buttons. She depressed two of the buttons for three seconds, then tapped another three times. In response, the unit's solar charge display darkened and then lit again in a cascade of yellow before flashing three times and emitting a "fully charged" chime. "I can't believe it-- seven hundred years, you said?-- and you've got it functioning properly!"

Throughout the process the robot's optics kept bobbing between her hands, her face, Captain McCrea and the other robot; she realized this and met its "eyes" quickly, trying to give its software time to study her key facial elements so it could pick a place to focus. To her shock, not only did the robot instantly meet her gaze, it also extended one of its end effectors and seized her hand, lifting and lowering it gently. Then it seemed to gather itself and rocked its whole little body to the rhythm of one word: "Waaalleeee."

She fell with a graceless thump onto her backside, surprise and exhaustion robbing her of balance. The allocator tilted its "head" and cooed with what sounded remarkably like concern. She felt her jaw working up and down furiously, but no sound was coming out; eventually, she tore her gaze away from the unit's optics and stared up at McCrea. "How did you do that?"

"Do what?" McCrea seemed genuinely puzzled.

"You reprogrammed it to mimic a greeting response and _introduce itself--"_ Rebuilding the unit somehow to make it operational, she understood. Teaching it to find eyes in a human face, well, that had already been done; the smoothness with which it followed her eyes with its optics, the _naturalness_ of it, being able to take her hand without "looking" and without undue pressure, giving it body language on top of it all…McCrea claimed they had no roboticists among the colonists, had told them that if it weren't for the Axiom's computer banks, nearly the sum total of the human race's knowledge would be lost. So just how had they rebuilt _and reprogrammed_ the unit to operate so smoothly?

The unit turned its optics up to the captain and warbled in what seemed to be a questioning manner. Then it turned back to her.

"We didn't reprogram him," McCrea replied. "He's just as we met him."

"It was still here, still operational, when you landed?" She heard her voice squeaking at the end of her question.

"No, no. He wasn't here when we landed; he came to the Axiom on a probe ship, with Eve, here." McCrea gestured at the white bot, and its eyes turned into crescents which gave it the appearance of a smile. "They brought back a plant to prove that Earth could sustain life again, so we _could _come home."

She felt her jaw working again, but she still had trouble producing a coherent question. "You didn't reprogram it."

"No."

The bot looked at her, tilting its optics curiously. "Waaalleeee," it said again, then tapped itself on the chest plate with its end effector. It then gestured at the white robot and said, "Eevah." The white robot seemed to smile once more.

Arcadia looked into the bot's optics, trying to see somehow beyond the hardware to the code, like searching someone's eyes for the truth. "So this is still my programming?" she asked, and the bot again turned its optics to the captain, as did its white counterpart.

"Your programming?"

Jacobs stepped in to save her as she was once more fighting to sort out the most basic of thoughts. "Dr. Koicto was in charge of the Waste Allocation Load Lifter project. Most of the classes got assigned to more specialized design supervisors once the basic design was formalized, but the Earth class--" he gestured at the little yellow bot-- "was Dr. Koicto's personal project all the way through to production."

At this, the robot actually seemed to get excited; it bounced a bit on its treads and clicked its effectors together, warbling and whistling at the white robot. The white one "smiled" again and held up one shining fin, the end of which suddenly separated into hovering "fingers"; the waste allocator then slipped its claw segments between those fingers and closed them gently.

Then the white robot hovered closer to the allocator's optics, tilted its head forward, and a delicate lace of electricity arced from one to the other. The two robots nuzzled one another, the white one with its face plate and the allocator with its optics, and then turned as one back to the dumbstruck Arcadia.

"Good. God," she whispered.

"Do not tell me," Emile said from somewhere over her shoulder and a million miles away. "Do not tell me that your stupid SL program finally worked."

"What's SL?" McCrea asked.

"Synthetic life," Emile replied.

James Cooper cut in, "There's no such thing as synthetic life."

"Not in our lifetime," Emile replied slowly, and Arcadia got the distinct impression, without looking around, that his gaze had never wandered from the allocation unit in front of them.

"Arcadia--" Jacobs began; when he didn't continue, she managed to tear her gaze from the unit's optics to look up at him, and he shrugged helplessly.

She looked back at the Wall-E unit. "I think I need to spend some time with this robot."


	5. Chapter 5

Thanks all for your patience while I tweaked and re-tweaked this chapter-- chapter 6 is underway!

-#-

Several of the new gardens flourished with bright flowers, and these sections featured benches in a variety of shapes inviting humans and robots alike to linger and enjoy them. After assuring Captain McCrea that they would be pleased to humor this newcomer, Wall-E and Eve led Arcadia into one of these gardens. Near the center of the garden a smooth bench-- Arcadia guessed it was constructed of recycled plastic-- featured a rounded indentation with a low, squarish seat next to it; Eve lowered herself into the former and Wall-E pulled himself onto the latter, gripping his tip-treads with his claws and clicking his "toes" together absently. Arcadia sat on another low bench, this one built for human children, which put her roughly at optics-level with the robots. Now that she was, essentially, "face to face" with them, she found herself unsure of how to proceed. She had expected to go to a diagnostics lab with the Wall-E unit, but the robots-- the robots!-- clearly had a different idea. Entranced with the thought that the bots were making and executing their own plans, she went along, but now she felt out of her element and at a complete loss as to where to begin.

Eve did not suffer such a problem. "You," she said, gesturing toward Arcadia with one fin, "made…Wall-E?"

Arcadia blinked a few times, still trying to sort out how to talk to these robots. She had pursued SL all of her career, and now that she might be faced with it, she found herself caught flat-footed. It was embarrassing. "I designed them and built some prototypes myself. The rest were factory-built according to my specs."

"Prototypes?" Eve asked, turning slightly toward Wall-E who looked back and forth between the two of them with evident interest.

"There were seven-- two Es, two Os, and three Ts. Only the Es got made. The Os and Ts just didn't work satisfactorily; the first E did, and we started the production run based on its specs." She poked a little at Wall-E's panel and he tilted his optics to watch. She found she had a hard time keeping her hands off of him; she wanted so badly to pop him open and examine every gear, every wire, to hook him up to a DiaLog computer and assess the state of his program-- but if her SL subroutine had worked, if he really was a form of synthetic life, then she could hardly...vivisect him. She suddenly felt as if the gears in her brain no longer meshed. She shook her head a little. "Anyway. We knew right away that five years wasn't enough time, so I started working on a long-term version of the Es. We expected the first run to last about ten to twenty years, maximum, with regular maintenance. Which, obviously, they weren't going to get. So I did a prototype with some tweaks-- better structural materials, for one thing, and a subroutine to give higher priority to self-maintenance and preservation. They were just going into production when we went into cryo." She tilted her head. "How _did _you make it this long, I wonder?"

Wall-E warbled at her. "Reeepaair."

"Repair? You repaired yourself?"

He nodded, miming the removal of a part from the air in front of him and then affixing it to himself.

"Wait a minute. You don't mean you repaired your own broken parts-- you mean you took parts from other machines and used them?"

He nodded again, then his optics drooped. "Wall-Es...gone."

She sat back. "You took parts from other Wall-Es after they failed." She let that information sink in. That definitely went beyond programming; she hadn't attempted to add any such subroutine to the Wall-Es for simplicity's sake-- they would need diagnostics capabilities for each other and more subroutines so they could identify units that had completely failed, to prevent scavenging parts off of units that were merely hibernating until they could recharge. Yet, this Wall-E could tell the difference without those subroutines and diagnostic capabilities. Moreover, he actually seemed _saddened_ that his counterparts had failed. Then another part of her brain kicked back into life. "How did you survive so many sandstorms?"

He pointed to his red alert light.

"Right. But surely, if you were alone and still functioning, you'd eventually get caught too far from shelter to protect yourself...."

Wall-E hopped onto the ground in front of Arcadia and pretended to dig at the pathway; then he hunched himself into box form, his eyes barely peeking out, and tented his claws over his optics like a roof. Eve giggled, her "hand" in front of her face screen as if to cover her mouth.

"You scraped the garbage..." Arcadia tried.

Wall-E pointed down with one claw, the other still over his head; when Arcadia shook her head, he scooped up a small amount of dirt and sprinkled it over himself.

_"You buried yourself?"_ she squeaked, and quickly found herself embarrassed at the amount of emotion in her voice. She was a scientist, after all...who was being confronted by the culmination of every dream she had ever had. She put her hand to her forehead and tried again. "You buried yourself when you were too far from shelter to protect yourself from the storms. Yes?"

Wall-E gave a low whistle and nodded.

She stared at him for a few more moments, then-- fighting the impulse to just grab him and _look_-- asked, "Do you mind if I check your serial number?"

He whistled again and, looking down, popped open his compactor. She knelt and peered inside at a small metal tag mounted on the back panel. To anyone but a BnL roboticist, it was a string of nonsensical numbers and letters. To Arcadia, it was a birth certificate, drivers license, and social security card rolled into one. _BnL_, of course, followed by _MODEL: WALL-E-55679-6367-0_, the factory ID number-- the factory closest to the robotics labs' headquarters, the one her own team worked with most directly. Next was the serial number for the run, __ISN: 667-98663-65-3_. Most units' serial numbers would next contain a numeric string to indicate where in the run they fell; instead, this unit had _NO. 07_, and below that, _AKDWALL07PROTO-WE1.1_. She sat back on her heels for a moment, brow furrowed. "Do you mind if I try something?" When he whistled encouragingly at her, she said, "Wall-E Prototype 1.1, execute program 'helloworld.'"

Immediately Wall-E's solar panel array, record, stop, and playback buttons flashed brightly; even his red alert light flashed, though it emitted no warning sound. Instead, a prerecorded male baritone boomed over his communication speaker: "Good morning, BnL, from BnL! Have a BnL day!" The BnL jingle then rang out from his speaker box.

She rubbed her forehead again. "I'm going to kill Emile."

Wall-E watched his panel with interest, tapping it gently with one claw while the jingle played. "Ooooooh!"

"Stop program," Arcadia said, and the jingle cut off. Emile liked to tinker with her "Hello, World" programs every chance he got, always relegating her original routine to a file with his own name added; she supposed it was his perverse way of getting revenge for her space-sucking SL subroutine. Somehow, he'd gotten to her prototype before they'd gone into cryo...but thankfully _after_ they'd presented it to the Board for approval. After all, the second generation run had been approved. "Wall-E Prototype 1.1, execute program 'helloworldemile.'"

Again Wall-E's front panel lit, though this time it did not flash; another male voice spoke, introducing Wall-E 1.1, the improved and preferred version of the highly successful Wall-E.... It was the pitch that they had programmed the unit to perform for the Board of Directors, seeking approval to alter the factory specs to produce longer-lasting Wall-Es. She remembered that meeting, her surprise and pleasure at getting the approval (it was going to cost a fortune for something most of the BnL execs had already decided was taken care of), and her tremendous pride in the shining yellow robot she had created. She remembered, in the elevator on the way back to the lobby, impulsively kissing the unit on one of its optics. She remembered Emile making fun of her for her sentimentality. She had gotten even with him by injecting super glue into a large bubble wrap bubble and dropping it into one of his shoes.

"Oooooooh!" Wall-E said again, his optics tilting back and forth as he listened to the pitch. Eve leaned toward him with evident interest until the voice fell silent. Wall-E poked at his panel a little, then turned back to Arcadia and clapped his claws together.

"Meaning?" Eve asked. "One-point-one?"

Arcadia glanced up at Eve's screen-- her eyes-- then back at Wall-E. "He's not part of the 1.1 version run," she corrected. "He's the prototype for it."

Wall-E bounced in place a little.

"Special," Eve said.

Arcadia grinned. "Very." She rubbed the edge of Wall-E's frame. "But theoretically you shouldn't be any different than any other model in that run. The only difference--" She paused, memories of her time with the prototype-- with this Wall-E-- tumbling forth like a waterfall; an image of herself, polishing his yellow paint until he reflected her face, another of her delighted kiss in the elevator, others of countless lunches spent in his-- _his_, not its-- presence, honing the nuances of his performance until he was the showpiece of their play for funding of the 1.1 run.... "The only difference I know of is that he has spent more time in human company. Something about the interaction must have triggered a different way of processing the SL program. I can't say for sure. Not yet." She smiled at the bots. "But I truly hope you'll let me spend more time with you. I'm not being arrogant to say that I'm one of the best roboticists BnL ever had. And you two have shown me that what I _don't_ know could still fill oceans. I'd like the chance to learn from you."

Eve smiled and turned to Wall-E, who nodded with what Arcadia took to be enthusiasm. "Naaaame?" he asked.

It took her a beat to realize what he was asking, then she smiled. "I've been rude, haven't I? I apologize." She placed her hand on her chest, mimicking Wall-E's earlier motions. "My name's Arcadia Koicto. Arcadia."

"Arcadia," Eve repeated, her eyes still smiling.

"Arrrrr," Wall-E attempted. "Cade-cadeee. Aaaah."

"Some people call me Cady," she replied. "You can call me-- well, whatever you want. I'll know what you mean."

"Caaadaaah," Wall-E said.

"Cadah's good." She smiled at him again, and his optics flexed happily. She found his emotions surprisingly easy to read; she wondered if that was because they were genuine, as opposed to programmed approximations. She reached out and touched the side of one of his optic units gently and he tilted his head into her hand.

Arcadia had never had children, nor had she ever wanted them; but at that moment, she understood the reaction of other women who would hold human infants and suddenly burn with the desire to give birth to their own.

"You are just adorable," she heard herself blurt, and Eve giggled. Wall-E looked back and forth between them again, tapping his toes once more. "And you kept working all this time? Seven hundred years? What did you do?"

Wall-E hopped off of his bench and held out his claw, obviously inviting her to take his hand. She took it with a grin and let the robots lead her on a tour of the colony, some of the surrounding area that Wall-E had cleared, and finally to his truck. He clearly invited her to sit on the floor, and Eve hovered politely beside her while Wall-E began pulling items off of the rotating shelves. At first Arcadia had no idea what he was showing her, but she began to make out the logic behind his grouping of items, and the whole array suddenly fell into sense before her eyes. She thought she might have to lift her jaw back into place manually.

It was a collection. The little bot had assembled a dazzling spectrum of items which had piqued his interest, some for play, some for practicality, from the Christmas decorations which provided light in the truck to his little lunch box cooler. She let herself gape. Long ago-- longer even than it seemed to her, she reminded herself ruefully-- when she had studied programming, she had hit a plateau in her learning that had nearly driven her away from robotics altogether. When she had finally broken through that plateau, pieces that had seemed diametrically opposed before suddenly dropped into place with the simplest of grace and the most mindbending of revelations-- the incredibly difficult suddenly made perfect sense while somehow also managing to display the enormous complexity of its design. That moment of breakthrough, when far-reaching routines and myriad subroutines suddenly became crystal clear to her, had just been reduced to dust in Wall-E's wake.

And to top off the moment of epiphany, Hal chose that moment to scuttle out of the floor grate, up Wall-E's body, and onto his hand. Wall-E warbled at the cockroach and turned the shelves back to Hal's sleeping compartment. Hal scurried down and hopped in place while Wall-E opened a snack cake for him and placed it carefully into the compartment. Wall-E turned back to Arcadia, completely unaware of the firestorm he was creating in her brain.

_It worked,_ her brain kept telling her. _A robot with a pet. _ _It worked. It worked.... _

The SL program had been part of the production run, millions of Wall-E units distributed throughout the world, and it had worked. It had worked, it had produced real, synthetic life, and BnL had left the lot of them behind, still toiling relentlessly, to develop their burgeoning life and then die, working, in their tracks. She, Jacobs and Emile had been angry to find out they'd been left behind in stasis; that paled in comparison to this-- the equivalent of millions of children, left behind in hopeless slavery until they perished. Her eyes burned suddenly, and she scrubbed at them with the palm of her hand.

Eve patted her shoulder in sudden alarm, and Wall-E warbled at her. She wiped the tears away viciously and shook her head at the robots. "I'm sorry," she told him. "I'm sorry that I did this to you. That I helped do this to you. I helped you come to life and then I left you behind. I'm so sorry."

Wall-E clicked his claws together and glanced back and forth between Eve and Arcadia. He cooed at them both in different tones; to Arcadia, he sounded soothing, and to Eve, encouraging. Eve took the cue and patted her shoulder again. "Not your fault," Eve pronounced carefully. "Cryo. BnL. Left also."

Arcadia nodded. Eve-- _she_-- was right, of course; but the guilt bit into her all the same, logical or not. She looked around thoughtfully and her eyes fell on the little cockroach. Hal had forgone the emotional drama and embedded himself in his snack cake, and she smiled genuinely at the sight of his cream-besmirched antennae. Wall-E obviously took good care of him....

And while she might not have been able to protect Wall-E and his brothers from centuries of loneliness and neglect, she could sure do something about it now. She turned back to the bots. "You're willing to let me spend time with you, to learn from you?" When they both nodded, she said, "Then I'd like to return the favor. I want to make up for what my company did to you, Wall-E. To all of you." He tilted his head at her and Eve hovered closer. "From what Captain McCrea told us, the colony needs farmers and fabricators and craftspeople. But you, the robots...you need us. Jacobs and Emile and me. I've never been anything but a roboticist; I don't see myself taking up farming now. He told us they've kept the parts fabricators aboard the Axiom functioning so all of you can keep yourselves in repair, right? I think I can take that a step further. I can help with upgrades, new equipment, new programming. Our labs were huge, and a lot of that was underground-- it was practically a bunker. I'm willing to bet that at least some of it is salvageable. I want to talk to the Captain about excavating it, if it's still there, and converting it over to serve any function you might need. Or want. And if it's not, we'll find someplace new. The Axiom has a great infirmary for the humans. I'd like to see you have more than an assembly line for repairs." She spread her hands. "I'll do anything I can for you. It's the least...the very least I can do. Does that sound acceptable?"

Wall-E bounced a little on his treads, and Eve beamed at him. " Waaalleeees," Wall-E said, gesturing toward the open door of the truck. " Reeepaair?"

Arcadia smiled slowly at him. Faced with the possibilities of a full-blown robotics lab at his personal disposal, and his first thought was of his fallen brothers. "Yes, Wall-E, if that's what you want. I'll repair any of them I can." Wall-E gurgled and cooed with such exuberance that she thought her chest might burst with pride. _Emile can bite me for more memory,_ she thought happily. _It was totally worth it._

-#-

(A note to reviewer HAL-9001-- the paragraph in this chapter about motherhood was already written before I posted the first 4 chapters-- so I loved that you identified Arcadia as Wall-E's Mom-E, but I couldn't tell you why without spoiling the "mommy moment." Well, now you know. g)


	6. Chapter 6

Thank you to everyone who has borne with me through the wait on this chapter; RL threw me a couple of curve balls, but I'm back for the nonce! Hope you like this little chapter, short though it is.

-#- -#-

Wall-E found himself a bit flummoxed to be the center of attention, but as many of Arcadia's questions concerned Eve, Hal, and his collection, he soon found himself warming to the conversation. He enjoyed talking about his beloved Eve and his little pet, and always had fun showing the odds and ends he had collected; and Arcadia made for a rapt audience. She asked her questions as quickly as Eve could translate his answers (When did he realize that he was aware? What was the first thing he did that was outside of his programming? Did he remember being activated at the factory? Did he remember any of his presentation to the Board? Did he remember anything before achieving sapience and sentience? When did he meet Eve? What had falling in love been like [to which she had added, to his curious delight, "if it's not too personal"]? How did he find and befriend Hal? Could he understand Hal? Did he teach himself to "speak cockroach," or did Hal learn to understand him? Could he speak the standard robotic language that Eve and the other robots of her generation used? What was the first item in his collection? Why did he choose it? Why did he pick up the sorts of things he did?). At times Eve had to gesture at both of them to slow down; in the face of Arcadia's eagerness to hear anything they had to say, he found himself chirping and warbling at her as if she were another robot and could keep up with the stream of noises.

At length Arcadia paused and glanced out of the door of the truck. Through the soft blackness, she could see glowing lights dotted throughout the colony in the distance. "Is it that late already?"

"Others?" Eve asked. "Concerned?"

"Steve and Emile won't be. They know me-- when I get talking robots, I--" She blinked as the two bots waited patiently for her to continue. "Talking robots _with_ robots…I really didn't think I'd live to see that." She grinned at them and Wall-E whistled happily. "But I should at least let them know what's going on."

Wall-E turned to Eve and rattled off a series of clicks and beeps at her. As they had just explained to Arcadia, Eve had quickly learned his-- to her-- antiquated language, and they often found it more expedient for her to translate for him when talking to humans. "Wall-E," Eve told Arcadia, "questions."

"I did monopolize the conversation, didn't I?" Arcadia grimaced. "Sorry about that."

Wall-E pointed toward the colony and beeped. "Ask there," Eve translated. He nodded and rolled out of the truck, humming brightly.

When his brothers had first started failing, he had done his best to teach them how to repair themselves. He had kept innumerable of them going far longer than they would have otherwise, but in the end, he simply couldn't perform the necessary repairs by himself and fulfill his directive to clear away the garbage...both jobs were too big for one little bot. They began shutting down despite his best efforts. Eventually he had resigned himself to living amongst their still forms, alone except for Hal. He had wished for company, but never hoped for it-- hope was for possibilities. It was illogical to hope for the impossible to come true. Then the universe had brought him Eve, and a whole shipful of friends. Now, it had brought Arcadia and her friends, and the promise of his brothers' repair. His steadfast good nature felt as if it might bubble over, and he bounced a little in time to his humming as he rolled along, his hand intertwined with Eve's. Life, he decided, was good.

-#-

Wall-E and Eve led Arcadia back to the center of the colony, a plant-lined circular area that served as a community meeting point where Captain McCrea and the other cryo survivors had already gathered. They had obviously just finished eating, and as the bots approached with Arcadia, Steve lifted a plate and handed it to her. "Well?"

She took it with a grateful smile. "Well. They're alive."

Steve shook his head, caught between disbelief and an uncontrollable grin. The grin finally won.

"'Cause she needs another boost to her ego," Emile said, but he was grinning, too. "You're sure they're--"

"Wall-E has a pet," she replied, and Emile shut his mouth with an audible click. She took a bite from her plate and paused. "Oh, that's good."

"It's all food we've grown ourselves," McCrea said proudly.

"Plaaaants," Wall-E added, clicking his fingers together.

She looked down at him. "You guys all did a great job." Steve and Emile indicated a picnic-style table at the edge of the circular area where the Coopers sat. She took a seat next to Jacobs; Wall-E settled next to the table and Eve hovered at his side.

McCrea sat across the table from her. "We're starting to produce enough of our own food now that we don't have to rely on the regenerative food buffet on the Axiom. That's been a real load off our minds...knowing that we can survive without relying on the ship for everything like we did at first."

"I can't imagine," Emile said, "what it must have been like, coming back to Earth and not knowing how you were going to eat if the ship's systems failed."

"We had to," McCrea replied simply. "We couldn't leave Earth like this. We had to make it right."

James Cooper, who had seemed thus far disinterested in the scientists' approach, now turned slightly toward McCrea. "I don't think anyone would have blamed you if you had taken one look at this mess and gone straight back to space. Living on a luxury cruiser had to be an easier life than this."

"It was easier," McCrea agreed. "But this is what needed to be done." He glanced around into the gathering darkness. "Truthfully," he continued, leaning forward and lowering his voice, "I'm still unsure about a lot. Everybody looks to me because I was the captain, but I have no idea how we're going to deal with some things. Like the garbage towers. We've found the tractors next to some of them and determined that they were incinerators, but they're all broken now. We don't know how to repair them. What are we going to do with all this garbage?"

Jacobs turned and grinned at Arcadia, who wrinkled her nose.

"Am I missing the joke?" McCrea asked good-naturedly.

"Arcadia never liked the idea of incinerating the garbage."

"Well, what's the good of cleaning the ground if you're just going to pollute the air?"

"And how else would you dispose of that much refuse in five years' time?"

"Being expedient doesn't keep it from being stupid."

Wall-E timidly tapped Arcadia's arm. "Re- regen...?"

She looked at him blankly for a moment, then turned to Eve for help. He warbled a query at Eve, and she translated, "Regenerative. Axiom." Her eyes turned to crescents.

Arcadia felt particularly dense. "The regenerative buffet?" she asked Wall-E. "Are you asking what it is, or--"

"Gah!" Emile waved at them all with both hands and turned to McCrea. "You said the colony grows enough of its own food that you don't rely on the ship's buffet anymore?" At the captain's nod, he said, "The regenerative buffet. Do you know what that means?"

"Uh...there's always food?"

"Well, that too, but actually it means that the regenerative chamber breaks down matter into molecular form and reconstructs it according to a preprogrammed paradigm."

Wall-E whistled, pleased that the humans had caught up with his thought process, and Eve gave him a swift hug.

Jacobs' jaw dropped. "Good lord. Garbage in--"

"-- and anything you program it for, out." Emile smiled. "The buffet used organic waste produced on the Axiom, reconstructing it into food. All we have to do is reprogram it to accept a broader base of materials, and tell it what we want it to turn those materials into."

"Can you do that?" McCrea asked eagerly.

"I think so," Emile replied. "A friend of mine worked on the programming for the buffets; I think I'm familiar enough with his work to figure it out pretty quickly. If the ship's computer still has all of its original back up files, it'll be a cinch."

"Wow...and it could make _anything_?"

"Virtually. As long as the base elements are present in sufficient quantities in the materials it's given."

"There's so much garbage out there," Arcadia said, "we should be able to find anything it wants."

"If you could do that for us-- I don't know how we would thank you--"

"Well," Jacobs said quietly, "it looks like we're here to stay. If we could join the colony...."

"Of course," McCrea replied, but he seemed confused. "I didn't think that was even a question."

As Jacobs shook his hand warmly, Arcadia cleared her throat. "I'm glad to hear that," she said when they turned to her. "I sort of have a project I want to undertake, with the colony's approval, of course."

"Sure, what is it?"

She smiled at McCrea; she looked forward to dealing with someone as genuine and honest as he. It would certainly make for a change from the BnL bureaucrats she was used to. "I want to see if our robotics lab is salvageable, and set it up to keep the bots in good shape."

"Oh, that's a fine idea."

"I'm glad you think so. I want to start repairing the defunct Wall-E units, too."

"You what?" Sheryl Cooper paused with her fork halfway between plate and mouth. "How many of them?"

"As many as I can."

"It would certainly help with the clean up," Jacobs pointed out.

"Yes, but it's not very practical, is it?" She put her fork down and smiled apologetically at McCrea. "I am-- or rather, I was-- an economist. If you've just gotten to a point where the colony can support itself, _and_ you're about to reassign your only reliable source of food production to something else, I would think any unnecessary use of resources would be out of the question."

"Unnecessary?" Arcadia frowned. "First of all, Steve's right, the work here is far from done and the Wall-Es would be a tremendous help. Second, we have proof here--" she gestured to Wall-E and Eve-- "that the Wall-Es were alive before they were left to rust. That deserves consideration."

James half-smiled. "They're machines. Machines break."

"It's not going to take food away from anybody to repair a few robots," Jacobs said, falling back into his role as Arcadia's mediator with an ease she might have found disturbing had she been paying attention.

Sheryl pursed her lips, but replied, "That's true. Just old habits dying hard, I suppose. I just couldn't imagine putting human well being below...well, anything."

"That's not what it sounds like to me," McCrea said. "Arcadia, do you expect that it would take away anything the colony needs?"

"Not at all. Hopefully, it would even let me earn _my_ keep." She grinned at him and tried to avoid making eye contact with either of the elder Coopers. Jacobs had always told her she was too attached to her projects, too overprotective; she guessed he was right. For Sheryl to suggest that the Wall-Es should be left to their fate, never knowing that anyone cared what had happened to them-- She reminded herself to take a breath. From their standpoint, the objection was valid. The fledgling colony couldn't take a setback right now of any kind; their independence was far too fragile. The loss of one season's crops would have them dependent again on the Axiom, and even the mighty starliner could only survive in atmosphere so long.

But the Wall-Es-- her little creations-- they did deserve better. And she honestly didn't fancy the idea of cleaning up the rest of the planet without robots; humans were too slow. They _needed_ help.

Plus it would make Wall-E, this wonderful prototype ALIVE Wall-E, happy. And for her, that was reason enough.

-#-

The excited conversation buzzed on well past midnight until the scientists finally hit the limits of their adrenaline. They, along with the Coopers, retired back to the Axiom to sleep, though the Coopers wisely did so long before the roboticists.

Wall-E and Eve, of course, didn't tire in precisely the same way, but Wall-E's solar charge blinked down to its last two bars when they reached the truck for the night. He wanted very much to keep talking to Eve, to speculate about the repairs to the other Wall-Es or what improvements Arcadia and the others might be able to make in him, but allowed Eve to giggle and shush him gently. She held up her hand, fingers spread, and he entwined his within them. He knew what she was telling him: _There is plenty of time for us. All the time in the world._

He sighed lovingly, his head tilted to the side, as she pushed him gently towards his sleeping compartment. He gestured toward Hal but she smiled and placed her hand over her chest lights, then tore open a snack cake and placed it in Hal's compartment. He burrowed his way into it happily and Wall-E tucked himself away for the night, aware in his last conscious moments that Eve was gently rocking their shelf and humming to him..._It only...takes a moment...._

He sighed contentedly. He would open his eye shields tomorrow to a whole new day.


	7. Chapter 7

AN: _Yee wow_, finally! Proof that this story is not abandoned! Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has read and reviewed and enjoyed-- it means more to me than you know!

Now, on to the important stuff. :)

-#- -#-

Though they left their truck shortly after dawn, Wall-E and Eve found the roboticists already gathered at the far edge of the colony. Apparently, the humans were as excited about this expedition as they were. Wall-E rolled up beside Arcadia and warbled at her, Eve drifting in by his shoulder. Arcadia turned, the slight scowl on her face changing immediately to a broad smile. "Wall-E, sweetie!" She bent over and kissed Wall-E on one of his articulated "eyebrows." Wall-E ducked his head in gentle embarrassment and clicked his fingers together while Eve giggled.

"And Eve!"

Eve bobbed a bit, as Arcadia was holding out one arm and watching Eve as if she expected a physical response. She hovered a bit closer, and Arcadia pulled her in for a quick hug. She floated back to Wall-E and giggled-- she found Arcadia's strange behavior quite entertaining.

"So," Jacobs said, clapping his hands, "are we ready?"

"Yes," Eve replied. Wall-E whistled.

"Glad somebody is," Emile said, grinning.

"Why?"

Arcadia answered Eve. "We've just been standing here for the last quarter of an hour arguing about where we are."

"I really can't believe it," Jacobs said. "It's only been two days for us. You'd think we'd remember how to get to work."

"Sure...from where?" Emile gestured at the buildings around them. "Do you know anything more faceless than a city with no signage?"

"Hmph. No facades or storefronts."

"I remember the Fumahol building...." Jacobs looked around, trying to locate said building.

Wall-E waved to Arcadia. "Oooo-hooo." When she looked down to him, he pointed down the street, whistled, and set off at a brisk pace. He stopped a few feet on, swiveled back to her, and waved her after himself.

Arcadia caught her teammates' eyes and tilted her head toward Wall-E, then fell into step behind the little bot, Eve drifting in her wake.

"Are you sure he knows--" Jacobs started, even as he followed along, but he let the question die at Arcadia and Eve's twin withering looks.

Wall-E cruised happily down the street, making sure the humans could keep pace with him and that he didn't lose them on any turns; just in case, though, he pushed his "play" button so that "Out There" sang through the city canyons. He didn't consciously remember the laboratory where he came into being, but his databanks provided the information readily and he sorted through it all as he led the way. He lingered over a few of the memories, whistling a little to himself in wonder. It had been a very, very long time since he had needed to review these files, but buried deep in his RAM he found images and video footage of the laboratory-- and the roboticists who followed him now. Back then, of course, he had not connected any emotions to the situations, for he had none; but now he did, and he found himself watching these internal memories with...fondness, he decided, was the right word for the feeling.

He remembered sitting on a wide, white table, tools and components arranged around him, while Arcadia sat at a table in an office a few feet away, her back to him as she ate. Every once in awhile, though, she would turn and study him through the window while she sipped her drink, and sometimes it seemed as though she would forget to keep eating again until some noise or motion in the hallway would distract her. He remembered Emile coming in and saying something to Arcadia, a smug grin on his face, but since Wall-E had no audio receptors at that point, he didn't record what Emile said. Arcadia reacted calmly but Emile laughed, and Wall-E now extrapolated from their current relationship that Emile was teasing her. After he left the room, Arcadia had leaped from her chair and thrown something-- a french fry, Wall-E's memory supplied-- after Emile. When she was done eating, she had washed her hands carefully and returned to him, muttering to herself (he had thought) until she had plugged in his audio components. Her mutterings, it turned out, had been to him, reassuring him that Emile was an idiot and that he would be fine.

At the time, of course, the words had meant nothing; but the Wall-E-of-now, reviewing the video, could remember that at the time, he had suffered some sort of catastrophic locomotive failure. Arcadia spent three days and two nights in the lab, sleeping there, eating there, until she had sorted out the problem.

Once, practical worker bot Wall-E would have assumed that she was intent on meeting the deadline for the starliners' liftoffs and the Wall-Es' activation. Now, having "met" her, he wondered if she would have done the same out of simple concern for the little robotic creature she had made.

He liked to think she would.

He buzzed up in front of a building that once had been white but was now the same buff color as the dust storms. He stopped and pointed up at the doors and whistled.

Eve looked back and forth between Wall-E and the building, excitement clear in her eyes and motions. Her Wall-E had come from this place-- she was eager to see inside. She waited impatiently while the three humans tried the front doors. After an attempt to open them failed, she unsheathed her gun, but Wall-E gently took her arm and lowered it. Jacobs fished in his pockets and pulled out a key card; none of them seemed to think it would work, and it didn't. Arcadia glanced at Eve. "I hate to just blow a hole in the building, but--"

Eve happily extended her gun barrel again.

"No, no, no-- if anything's still intact in there, let's not blow holes in it." Jacobs stepped back and studied the building. For security purposes, the first floor had no windows; a wide concrete balcony girded the building just above the first floor. He glanced at Eve. "Do you think the Eve unit could fly up and get through a window?"

"Why don't you ask her?" Arcadia replied, cocking her head to one side.

"Uh...." He turned to Eve. "Could you please fly up and...get through a window."

Eve shook her head, not in disagreement, but with grinning, crescent eyes, an expression of playful pity. The senior roboticist was clearly still having difficulty with the concept that they were sentient. She gave him a little salute and shot up into the air.

Most of the windows were shattered or just plain gone. She chose one and sped through it, then stopped in dismay.

Everything, _everything_, was destroyed. "No...," she murmured, drifting through the silt-covered building, her scanner working overtime. The dust storms had absolutely scoured the place down. Any electronic equipment here was ruined beyond repair.

She began pushing through the mounds of dust, unearthing old chair frames and desks sanded free of paint, rusted and empty. Any computers she found had fared less well. She spun a bit in place, looking for any corner of the vast expanse that had survived, and finding none.

She hadn't realized until that moment how much hope she had placed on this building once Arcadia had mentioned it. Wall-E was so much older than they that the Axiom repair bots and databanks had been unable to supply replacement parts-- he simply wasn't in their catalog of available designs. Eve wanted Wall-E's brethren repaired if it would make her beloved happy, yes, but of greater importance, to her at least, was that her own Wall-E would have help if he began to fail...as she knew, sooner or later, he would.

But Eve was a practical bot, and in the seconds in had taken her to enter the building and scout it, her processor had retrieved a vital bit of information and thrust it into the forefront of her thoughts: _"underground...practically a bunker."_ She darted back out a window and called down to the group below. "Doors! Away!" As soon as they began moving, she dodged back inside, zipped down the first stairwell she found and headed for the front doors, eagerness giving way to anxiety. A quick blast with the lowest level of her ion cannon cleared both front doors.

Wall-E and the others had taken shelter in the building's alley and returned to find a gaping door frame. "Nice," Arcadia said, nodding, as she stepped into the building. "Oh, wow."

Her colleagues stopped next to her just inside the entrance. "Wow," Emile repeated.

"Downstairs," Eve said, pointing toward the stairwell door. "Lab."

The humans snapped on the flashlights they carried. "Should we have brought oxygen tanks?" Emile asked as they walked toward the door, their footsteps raising sinister clouds of dust.

Eve ran a quick check on the atmosphere and found it to be tolerably safe for humans. She pointed at a blinking orange light on her front panel. "Sufficient." Then she pointed again at the door.

Emile paused for a moment. "Yeah. That's reassuring." He kept walking, but told Arcadia, "If we die, I'm blaming you."

"Like that's news."

Jacobs pulled the door open, stirring the dust again. From the tracks the door had carved the first time when Eve came through, the silt on the floor was at least two inches thick. Despite the sweeper at the bottom of the door, the stuff had infiltrated the stairwell, too. The flashlights tossed shadows as they descended, and everywhere the beams alighted, they revealed the same dull coating of dust.

Wall-E kept glancing at Eve as he carefully tracked down the stairs, one hand on the handrail, the other curled against his chest plate. He wasn't entirely sure why she was worried, but he suspected. He knew what this powdery soil meant, better than any of them. For robots, it was death. He knew very well that if the labs had been exposed to the storms, if any part of the floor or ductwork or door seals had given way, nothing but an indoor dustbowl awaited them when they reached the basement. One crack in the wrong spot, and his brothers were frozen in place for good.

But Wall-E was, if nothing else, optimistic by nature. Life had brought Hal to him, and Eve, and all of his robot and human friends. If the labs had been destroyed, he still had an embarrassment of riches. If they weren't, well, then all the better. He reached out and took Eve's slender, graceful fingers in his own. She seemed to start, then gave him a tender smile and a nuzzle on his optic units. He smiled back at her with his eye shields, trying to explain to her that, no matter what they found, they already had all they needed.

They reached the bottom, still holding hands.

Arcadia glanced back at them all, her face grim in the poor light. She opened the door.


	8. Chapter 8

AN: Good grief, Charlie Brown, it's an update! Well, apparently my original attempt at chapter 8 crashed and burned, conspiring with RL to delay this update even longer. But here's the brand new chapter 8...and I WILL finish this little story, gosh darn it! :)

-#- -#-

Arcadia stood in the doorway for an eternity of heartbeats, her arms hanging enervated at her sides. Wall-E suffered no such paralysis, though, and shot past her into the room, whistling wildly and nearly tipping onto one track as he careened through the tables and lab stations, Eve flying above him as he chattered at her. One by one the overhead lights clunked and hummed as the pair set off motion sensors and the ancient systems routed forgotten power from the solar panels on the roof down to the lab, lighting the robotics lab for the first time in seven hundred years.

It was perfect. All of it. Spotless, dust free, everything in place and waiting for their return for seven centuries. Arcadia felt tears on her cheeks; she hadn't even known she was crying. She shook herself back to reality as Wall-E zoomed back up to her, waving something in front of her and chanting, "Ooooh! Ooooh!" She took it from him. It was a Wall-E unit arm, bright yellow with stark black and white striping, capped wires just waiting for an end effector. He zoomed away again, singing brightly to himself. Eve smiled, shook her head, and zoomed after him. He returned moments later with an optical unit and playback chip; another few moments and he had added a section of track to the growing pile in her arms.

"Um," Emile said, "maybe you should explain to him that this isn't how you build a new...ah...Wall-E."

Arcadia grinned through her drying tears. "He's having fun."

Jacobs touched her arm lightly, and she turned. "Thank you."

She blinked at him. "For what?"

He looked back toward the two robots zooming around the lab. "For leading us here. For letting us be part of..." He waved toward Wall-E, at a loss for how to describe the monumental significance of a robot "having fun."

Tears spilled again as she nodded.

"OOOO POP!" came Wall-E's joyous voice from somewhere in the lab, followed by a barrage of retorts that sounded like automatic gunfire. The humans sprinted for the sound to find Eve trilling out a roll of large-pocket bubble wrap behind her and Wall-E running over it as fast as she could roll it out. Wall-E skidded to a sideways halt on the plastic and gestured wildly at the humans. "Oooo pop!" He reached down and held up a piece of the desiccated packing material and gestured toward them with his head. "Oooo pop."

Emile grinned and grabbed the plastic. He looked back at the other two, shrugged one shoulder, and began popping the bubbles that Wall-E's tracks had missed.

Wall-E clapped his hands together, danced a little in place, then resumed his wild ride, filling the lab with snaps and little robotic sounds of joy.

"Well, he found the shipping staging area," Jacobs said.

"Thanks for the update, chief," Emile replied, still busily snapping bubbles.

Arcadia shook her head at them and put the Wall-E parts on the nearest assembly table. It was time, after seven centuries, to get started.

-#- -#-

"Over here, sweetie. Right here. Like this." Arcadia pulled one of Typ-E's hands toward her and fiddled with the soldering iron they had specially fitted just for him. He applied it carefully to the wires she was showing him, along with the solder attached to his other hand, and finished the connection with a delicate touch. "Very good! _Very_ good. You're a natural. You'll have this little guy up and running in no time." She patted Typ-E's casing enthusiastically and he vibrated a little in the air, obviously pleased with himself. "You should be proud," she told him. "You're a quick learner. Quicker than Emile."

Emile glanced up at them from across the table, mock-glaring at her through his safety goggles. "I heard that."

"I didn't whisper, did I?" She left Typ-E to finish his connections and headed over to where M-O and Wall-E were taking apart one of Wall-E's defunct brethren. "How's he look?"

Wall-E whistled as he turned one of the unit's disconnected arms this way and that, examining it closely. M-O held up its motherboard balanced on his brush and chattered at her, ultimately shaking his head with a "No, no, no." He laid the board on the floor in front of him and rubbed it with his brush. She winced, but the little bot was careful. They were all taking Wall-E's project very seriously.

Wall-E handed her the arm and tapped it. "Oooo."

"What do I think?" She examined it. "I think it's salvageable." They both turned to M-O, who had stopped scrubbing and was inspecting the board again.

"Ehh," he said, gesturing at her to take it.

She took it to their testing station and began the diagnostics. So far they had been able to match all the viable boards to working bodies, but every body had required new parts supplemented from the lab's stock. She harbored a few worries about what might happen if they wound up with more boards than bodies- essentially brains and hearts with nowhere to go- but they'd been lucky so far. She smiled as the diagnostics finished. "It's good."

M-O gave a celebratory chirp, waving his brush above his head, and then zoomed out of the lab to find the next project that needed his attention. Wall-E rolled over to her and tugged at her sleeve. They had a small margin of bodies ready ahead of motherboards- two, at the moment- and Wall-E hated waiting to get the new boards fitted. She handed him the board and the two of them headed into the next room, where a few bots and several children (under adult supervision, usually by John or Mary) refitted Wall-E bodies. At first, the children had followed the bots' lead of restoring the Wall-Es to a factory finish; but as they explored the lab and turned up other store rooms and supplies, they began to get creative. The current Wall-E bodies awaiting reactivation were assembled exactly like the "original" Wall-E, but one had been painted deep blue and the other was bright green with yellow stripes on his arms and chassis. One of the kids saw them coming and waved a loaded paintbrush, splashing a little magenta into her own hair. "Hi, Wall-E!" she called brightly before slapping her brush onto the blue robot in a wonderful zigzag of color along his side. "Hi, Cadah!"

Wall-E waved back at her and headed for the green one. This one's paint was dry, whereas the blue was obviously still a work of art in progress. He flipped open the unit's front panel and handed the motherboard to Arcadia.

She took it, but asked, "Are you sure you aren't ready to try one yet?" He shook his head but watched her avidly, tapping his knuckles together in anticipation. She attached the newly cleaned board and slotted it into place on the newly painted robot, then held his panel buttons down in the reboot sequence. His panel speaker chimed, and slowly he raised his head and adjusted his optic units. His optics zoomed in and out, then he seemed to focus on Wall-E.

"Zzzzzrrrr," he said, and Arcadia patted his head. Without fail, the newly activated units would fumble through their various sounds, attempting the speech that Wall-E was still learning; but also without fail, they showed an understanding of the spoken word that suggested they had, like Wall-E, gained an intelligence all their own. They just didn't know how to express it yet.

Wall-E grabbed the blue unit's hand and tugged, whistling at him and pointing toward an outside door. He and Eve worked extensively with them, teaching them words, showing them the small city growing around them and the progress they'd made. He headed toward the door and the blue one followed willingly after.

"No moss growing under those treads," Emile remarked from behind her.

"Wall-E's a busy guy," she agreed. "I like the racing stripes the kids are putting on them."

"It makes them go faster," Emile said. "Everybody knows that. Works with cars, must work with robots." She started to head back into the lab but he stepped in front of her. "Ah, what time is it?"

"Drat. Forgot to stop for lunch again, didn't I?"

"I don't know why that always comes as such a surprise to you. You do it almost every day. Always have."

"I took a seven hundred year break from doing it." She turned back around and the two of them headed out into the sunshine. As soon as they stepped outside, though, shouts and squeals from nearby abolished all thoughts of lunch. Arcadia and Emile ran toward the commotion, following the sounds and other settlers to one of the active worksites.

This particular site was a collapsed garbage tower that was being scooped up, crushed into manageable bales, and toted to the regenerative buffet for reforming. At present all work had stopped and one of the great Wall-As working the site held a massive claw in the air from which most of the squeals emanated. His partner had both claws on the ground, shielding something from view. The colonists had circled around with Captain McCrea in the forefront. He looked around as Arcadia and Emile squeezed through the onlookers. "What's going on?" Emile asked as Arcadia surveyed the robots.

"I don't know yet. The Coopers seem to think the Wall-As have done something to Daniel."

"Damn right, they've 'done something,'" James Cooper snarled over McCrea's shoulder at the scientists. "That piece of construction equipment has scooped up my boy, and nobody will shut the thing down to get him back. It's going to crush him!"

"No, it isn't," McCrea said, "or it would have already."

"Is that supposed to make us feel better?" Sheryl spoke up from beside her husband. "That it hasn't killed him _yet_?"

Arcadia rolled her eyes and waded out through the garbage to the massive Wall-A. Eve hovered near his base and floated up to Arcadia as she approached. "Boy," Eve said, gesturing upward with her fin. "Misbehaved."

"Yeah? What did he do?"

Eve gestured at the other Wall-A, and Arcadia could see now that Wall-E parked in front of the Wall-A's lowered claws, his own arms crossed as resolutely as he could make them. He uncrossed them to wave brightly at her, then crossed them again, though it took him a moment to figure out the configuration a second time. The defiant pose was obviously not natural for him.

Arcadia patted the Wall-A on his front panel. "Put him down, please."

The Wall-A turned his lights toward her and rumbled deep inside. "Please," she repeated. "I'll see to whatever happened, I promise." He rumbled again, but slowly lowered his claw. Two feet above the ground, he tipped Daniel out onto a pile of decomposing _something_ and pointed to the elder Coopers with his now-empty hand. Daniel took the hint and bolted away from the robots. Arcadia patted the Wall-A again and headed for his partner, and Wall-E. "Wall-E? What happened?"

He pointed at the giant claws as they parted, and M-O dashed out from between them, his eye lights narrowed, buzzing angrily. "M-O."

Arcadia scooped M-O up as he stormed past her. "Hold on, there. Are you okay? Are you damaged?"

M-O sputtered and waved his brush. "Aggh!" She grabbed his brush and he stilled. He was covered in tiny pock marks and chips in his paint.

"What in the- what happened?"

M-O tapped his brush against himself, then waved it toward the knot of people. Wall-E tugged at her shirt hem and held something up. She took it from him. It was a chunk of masonry, nearly the size of a baseball, and one point still had a smudge of white paint transfer.

Her first urge was to go straight back to the Coopers and start raging, but that reaction would help nothing. She counted to ten, probably too quickly, gave M-O a reassuring squeeze, and put him down. She took a deep breath, then walked calmly back to McCrea and the others, promising herself she would remember to praise Eve thoroughly for not shooting anyone. The temptation had to be fierce.

Before she'd even stopped walking, Sheryl started yelling at her. "This is what you're trying to make more of? These machines? They're dangerous. They're obviously not programmed right. They're going to kill someone! And you're spending all your time making more when you should be dismantling the damn things." She added as Eve floated up behind Arcadia, "_All_ of them."

"No one's dismantling anyone," McCrea said before Arcadia could react. "The Wall-A didn't hurt Daniel, and I'm sure he had a very good reason for picking him up."

"He did." Arcadia handed the rock to McCrea. "Daniel was throwing these at M-O."

McCrea turned to her, alarmed. "Is he hurt?"

"Are you joking?" James practically shouted. "You're worried about that robot, when our boy-"

"Your boy is fine, Mr. Cooper. We already know that. Now-"

"I can't believe this. I can't believe that in the past seven hundred years, the human race have all become morons."

"There's no need for namecalling. And there's no reason to think the robots are dangerous. They've helped us every step of the way since we've been back on Earth. If it weren't for them, you'd still be frozen."

Cooper turned his back.

Sheryl leveled a finger at Arcadia and Emile. "This is what happens when you don't focus on the right things. There's nothing more precious than human life- nothing. Everyone should be spending all their time and energy taking care of the _people_ in this colony, not the equipment. You're stealing resources from these people, and teaching the children that it's okay!" She turned to the rest of the small crowd that had formed. "Do you really think it's okay for your kids to spend all their time playing with these robots, instead of learning, or doing chores for the colony?"

A few people shifted their feet, and some murmuring started in the back of the crowd.

"That's enough," McCrea barked, his voice authoritative enough to shut her up. "If it weren't for these robots-"

"We'd still be on the Axiom," someone in the crowd called, "with plenty of food."

"We have plenty of food now."

"And air conditioning," someone else said.

"And it didn't stink." The murmuring began to grow.

"Fine," McCrea said, "go back."

The murmuring stopped.

"Go back. Auto should still work; so should the Axiom. We'll reinstall the food buffet. Of course, if you're trying to get away from the robots, you won't want to use Auto; but instructions on how to fly the ship are all loaded in the computer. Go to it. Good luck out there, doing the same thing day in, day out, with no cares, no worries, no goals, no accomplishments..."

A few people began to give each other guilty glances, while others began to grin at the troublemakers' discomfiture.

"Go on back, knowing that you're raising your children to have exactly the same life that you did, and your parents did, and their parents, and their great-great-grandparents, with exactly the same _nothing_ to show for their lives.

"Or you could stay here, and restart the world.

"So it's up to you. Pick where you want to be. Out there, safe and doing nothing, or here, where the future is a little uncertain...but it's ours. Because we're the ones shaping it." He looked around, meeting eyes in the crowd that had a hard time meeting his. "So, which is it?"

No one spoke.

"Cowards," Sheryl spat, and she pushed her way through them, towing Daniel along behind her. James gave McCrea a contemptuous look before following them.

McCrea shrugged them off, and the crowd began to disperse. "Well done," Emile told him.

He shook his head. "I can't believe we're even having this discussion, especially this long after we've come back." He turned back to Arcadia. "Is M-O hurt?"

"I don't think so. But he's going to need resurfacing and a paint touch up."

M-O and Wall-E rolled up behind her, leaving the Wall-As to continue their task, in time to hear her statement. M-O tapped her on the ankle with his brush and she looked down at him. "No."

"No, what?"

He tapped again and glanced down at his side, indicating the pock marks. "No."

"You don't want me to fix your scratches?"

He turned to Wall-E and tapped the rust stains and dent on Wall-E's front panel, then gestured at himself with his brush again. "Tough," he stated with a sharp nod.

She gave him a crooked smile. "Okay, tough guy, you keep your battle scars as long as you want. But if you ever want a touch up, you just come and see me or Emile, okay?"

"'Kay." He gave a little hop and buzzed away.

Wall-E touched the curved dent in his panel and the rust surrounding it. Arcadia knelt beside him. "You know that offer still stands for you, too," she told him softly.

He tilted his head back and forth at her. "Iiiii know." He touched the spot again, gently. "Me."

"You would still be you. Our shells shouldn't define us. We are who we are, no matter what we look like."

"Yeah," Emile said, his voice practically dripping with derision, "I wish someone would explain that to the Coopers."

Arcadia gave Wall-E a quick peck on his optic unit. "It's up to you, sweetie. It'll always be up to you." Together, the little group headed back to the center of the settlement.


	9. Chapter 9

Much as she hoped McCrea had settled the matter for good, Arcadia had little faith in human sensibilities. She expected someone, if not the Coopers then someone they had frightened with their alarmist reactions, to pitch another fit any day, and was unfortunately not disappointed. One bright mid morning, while she was lying with several of the bots on top of Wall-E's truck teaching them how to find shapes in clouds, one of the colony's children clambered onto the roof, breathless.

"Captain McCrea sent me to get you! They've made contact with another starliner!" The boy looked like he might burst with excitement and pride at the importance of his mission; he kept staring at Wall-E like...well, Arcadia thought, like the hero he was to most of the Axiom's erstwhile crew.

Wall-E whistled and took Eve's fin before trundling down to the ground and off toward the center of the settlement. Arcadia followed leisurely behind M-O and the others. The anxious boy led them to the great house where, normally, someone would be setting up for lunch. Today, however, McCrea was gathering people to tell them the news.

As soon as the room had filled with as many colonists as could attend, he announced that they'd heard from the starliner Hyperion. Not quite as large as the Axiom, she actually held more people now.

And they were on their way home.

Once, such news would have brought reactions of unmitigated joy from the Axiom colonists. Now, though, with fear planted and well-rooted, the response was not as uniform as McCrea had obviously hoped. The low murmur mixed in with the celebratory noises didn't seem to catch him off guard, though. He may have _hoped_, but apparently hadn't _expected_.

Leadership was making him a wise man, Arcadia supposed, and it was a good thing for these people that he was letting himself learn. He was a good leader for the colony.

"This is a joke." James Cooper practically spat with anger as he spoke. "We're barely scraping by now. And you want us to support more people? With the same resources? How's that supposed to work?"

McCrea corrected him patiently. "They'll be able to work, too, and the Hyperion will have a lot of the same resources that the Axiom had."

"You going to use them for more robots?" Sheryl demanded.

Arcadia put a hand to her forehead. She knew she shouldn't respond, but she was just too damn tired of it. "What is it with you and the robots? They aren't hurting anything."

"They're helping," John pointed out.

Mary added, "Better and faster than humans can, on a lot of these jobs."

"We need food," James said, "not a cleaner, prettier patch of dirt. We should toss the lot of them through the buffet and put them to better use."

"We need the 'patch of dirt' precisely to grow more food."

"It's a waste of time!"

"We're fixing our mistakes, making the world better-"

"It's too late to fix it; we need to just resign ourselves to how it is and make sure we can survive day to day."

The argument looked like it would rage on for hours, but Arcadia lost track of it as soon as James suggested destroying the robots. "You can't kill the robots."

He scowled and his part of the tirade came to an end. "Of course we can't kill them. They aren't alive to kill."

She crossed her arms. "Yes, they are." She looked down at Wall-E. "They've developed sentience. They're as alive as you and I, and have the same right to live as we do."

He gaped at her for a moment, then snorted. "You're a scientist. You shouldn't believe robots can be alive."

"First of all," she replied, advancing on him, "don't tell me what I should or shouldn't believe. And second, I _am_ a scientist, and I have to believe the science. Proof. As a scientist, don't have the luxury of ignoring it like you do."

He looked like the vein across his forehead might explode. "You can't talk to me that way, insulting my intelligence-"

"Yeah, I think I can."

McCrea stepped between them. "No one's killing the robots." A little grumbling followed his statement and he looked around, trying to identify the malcontents. "Please, we need to settle this issue in a civilized way."

Sheryl spoke. "Why did the Axiom land? It was because of a malfunctioning robot, right? It damaged the ship so badly you had to put it to ground."

McCrea shook his head. "No. We came back because Wall-E let us know we could."

That wasn't enough to appease her. "You can't trust them. One malfunction and those EVE probes are shooting lasers at everyone."

Arcadia exchanged exasperated glances with Eve while Wall-E tapped his hands together. He cooed in concern, reaching up to take Eve's fin. She cooed back at him, but his optic units still tilted like worried eyebrows.

Knowing as he always somehow did that Wall-E was upset, Hal came out of his casing and wriggled his thorax. When that didn't get a response, he hopped onto the nearest table to give Wall-E a better view of his amusing little dance.

James saw him. "What the- get it!" He swung his hand down in an arc toward the cockroach.

Pandemonium ensued.

Wall-E shrieked at seeing his pet endangered and bolted forward to wrap his metal hands around Hal. James brought his fist down on Wall-E's knuckles, and swore as the impact skinned his own. Colonists scrambled, those close enough to have seen Hal rushing forward for a late rescue, others charging in to see what had happened. All the while, Wall-E stayed huddled over the bug on the table, even as James picked up a nearby pitcher to swing at Wall-E's head and Eve powered up her cannon to shoot James.

"Dad, wait!"

Arcadia had lunged forward but too late, watching the whole thing as if it were in slow motion, sure that it was going to end in bloodshed and who knew what other repercussions, but this- this was the one thing she figured could have stopped the elder Cooper.

James and Eve both paused, James turning toward his son, Eve keeping her eyes and gun trained on him. Daniel approached the table and patted the top of Wall-E's body casing. "You got a bug?"

Wall-E turned his optic units toward the boy, then slowly opened his hands to reveal a very confused Hal. Hal hopped up onto Wall-E's arm and scampered upward to the top of his casing.

Daniel stared at him for a long, long moment. At last Wall-E scooped Hal up and gestured toward Daniel with him, cooing as he did.

_Making introductions,_ Arcadia realized. She shook her head. All she wanted to do was punch the entire Cooper family. Obviously, Wall-E was a much better person than she. Too bad the Coopers couldn't understand that.

Tentatively Daniel reached out and touched Hal gently on the head with his fingertip. "He's your pet, isn't he?" he asked. When Wall-E nodded and chirped an affirmative, he said, "I had a dog. We had to leave him behind when we got frozen to sleep. I guess he's dead now." He reached up and rubbed fiercely at his eye.

James reached for Daniel's shoulder. "Son."

Daniel was having none of it, and pulled away. "I didn't want to leave him," he told Wall-E, but no one there doubted that he was really talking to his parents. "But I had to. They made me." He rounded on his parents. "You shouldn't make Wall-E lose his pet, too."

The Coopers looked truly remorseful. Sheryl was crying, not bothering to wipe away her tears. Daniel looked back and forth between his parents and Wall-E. "I don't think we should be mean to the robots anymore. I think you're wrong."

"Daniel-"

The boy crossed his arms and set his mouth in a firm line that left no doubt that he was used to getting his way. The one time he apparently hadn't, he'd lost his dog, and clearly he was risking nothing like that again. "I like them," he stated with great finality. He then turned to look up to Arcadia. "Can I learn how to fix them, too?"

Emile made a strange noise behind her, but her attention was on Wall-E. She smiled a little. "That's up to the boss man, here. Wall-E? I know Daniel hasn't been very nice to you guys. Should he be allowed to help?"

James looked like he might absolutely explode, but Wall-E's little shrug and chirp derailed him. Arcadia met James's eyes defiantly. "Looks like Wall-E's going to be the bigger man here and accept an apology. Feel like giving one?" She snapped her mouth shut, knowing she'd already gone pretty far and that she should have just left the situation alone rather than snark at him, but she couldn't unsay it. To her relief, though, James didn't snap back; he just strode away from them and out of the building.

Sheryl, though, pulled Daniel toward her in a hug and spoke over his head to Arcadia. "We just want our son to be safe. To- to have enough to eat. To have a future."

"We know that," McCrea said gently. "We all want that, for everyone here. But you have to believe us, you have to trust us, that...well...things have changed over the past seven hundred years." He smiled kindly to soften the statement. "It doesn't have to be 'us or them.' There's just us- all of us. Robots and humans." He glanced down at Wall-E and at Hal on his "shoulder." "And cockroaches. We can do this. We can make the world what we want it to be. What it should be. We have a chance to make everything right again, for everyone. We all want the same thing. Don't we all want that?" The colonists murmured again. It was hard to argue. "For ourselves, for our children."

"For the planet," Emile put in, then shrugged when Arcadia raised an eyebrow at him. "What? As long as we're being sappy..."

McCrea grinned at him but nodded in agreement. "I guess it's hard not to be sappy when you're talking about giving the world a future. But that's exactly what we can do here. If we do it right." He held out his hand to Sheryl, who looked dubious. Arcadia wasn't surprised at her reluctance to buy into McCrea's speech; she carried too much of the old world with her. Cynicism was hard to shed. Arcadia knew from experience, from expecting trouble from the human colonists at every turn.

Daniel, however, grabbed McCrea's hand and gave it a solid shake. "Deal," he said.

~#~

Daniel's sudden departure from his parents' doctrine didn't fix things overnight, nor did anyone expect it to. But his behavior toward the robots did change instantly, and his parents grew less vocal about their concerns. Arcadia didn't doubt they still had them, but at least they weren't trying to make anyone else suffer for their own fears.

The Hyperion landed safely, an elegant little thing next to the stately Axiom, and Arcadia sat down in the dirt and cried when Jacobs investigated the ship and came back out to tell her that it carried gene banks full of flora and fauna. The colony was nowhere near the point where they could use any of it, but the day was coming, and the hope it gave her overwhelmed. Emile and Jacobs had no idea how to deal with her sobs, but fortunately Wall-E and Eve suffered no such limitation, Wall-E taking her left side to pat her shoulder soothingly and Eve rubbing her other shoulder with one fin. Eve cooed at her while Wall-E dipped his optic units, trying to figure out why good news made her sad.

She leaned her head against Wall-E's. "It's okay," she blubbered, giving a loud sniff and dripping tears onto his casing. "It's okay."

"Plaaants," he said. She nodded, smiling despite her tears. He gave her a little poke with one hand. "Oooo?"

"Me, help plant them?" She wiped at her nose as he nodded. "Sure, I'll help, if you want me to." She looked around. "I don't think there'll be any shortage of volunteers, though."

He clicked his hands together and danced in place. "Oooooh." He buzzed over to a garden bed and gestured to the young plants there. "Oooo plant." He clicked his hands together, then looked to the bed beside it. He zipped sideways to investigate that one, as well. "Plant," he said, not even looking their way, just gesturing at the rich dirt with one hand. He pointed back and forth between the two beds, clearly trying to decide if they should put their future plants in one, the other, or both. "Cadah," he called. He pointed definitively at the first bed. "Plant."

Eve giggled and floated toward him. They joined hands, their discussion lost on the breeze as they talked plants and future plans.

Future plans. For the first time in a long time, Arcadia looked forward without trepidation to what those plans might bring, and all because of someone she had created.

All because of Wall-E.


End file.
